Posts Tagged 'Hackathon'

Introduction to Hackster.io

Over the weekend in San Francisco, I attended a very cool hackathon put together by the good folks at Hackster.io. Hackster.io’s Hardware Weekend is a series of hackathons all over the country designed to bring together people with a passion for building things, give them access to industry mentors, and see what fun and exciting things they come up with in two days. The registration desk was filled with all kinds of hardware modules to be used for whatever project you could dream up—from Intel Edison boards, the Grove Starter Kit, a few other things that I have no idea what they did, and of course, plenty of stickers.

After a delicious breakfast, we heard a variety of potential product pitches by the attendees, then everyone split off into groups to support their favorite ideas and turn them into a reality.

When not hard at work coding, soldering, or wiring up devices, the attendees heard talks from a variety of industry leaders, who shared their struggles and what worked for their products. The founder of spark.io gave a great talk on how his company began and where it is today.

Building a thing!
After lunch, Phil Jackson, SoftLayer’s lead technology evangelist, gave an eloquent crash course in SoftLayer and how to get your new thing onto the Internet of Things. Phil and I have a long history in Web development, so we provided answers to many questions on that subject. But when it comes to hardware, we are fairly green. So when we weren't helping teams get into the cloud, we tried our hand at building something ourselves.

We started off with some of the hardware handouts: an Edison board and the Grove Starter Kit. We wanted to complete a project that worked in the same time the rest of the teams had—and showed off some of the power of SoftLayer, too. Our idea was to use the Grove Kit’s heat sensor, display it on the LCD, and post the result to a IBM Cloudant database, which would then be displayed on a SoftLayer server as a live updating graph.

The first day consisted mostly of Googling variations on “Edison getting started,” “read Grove heat sensor,” “write to LCD”, etc. We started off simply, by trying to make an LED blink, which was pretty easy. Making the LED STOP blinking, however, was a bit more challenging. But we eventually figured out how to stop a program from running. We had a lot of trouble getting our project to work in Python, so we eventually admitted defeat and switched to writing node.js code, which was significantly easier (mostly because everything we needed was on stackoverflow).

After we got the general idea of how these little boards worked, our project came together very quickly at the end of Day 2—and not a moment too soon. The second I shouted, “IT WORKS!” it was time for presentations—and for us to give out the lot of Raspberry Pi we brought to some lucky winners.

And, without further ado, we present to you … the winners!

BiffShocker

This team wanted to mod out the Hackster’s DeLorean time machine to prevent Biff (or anyone else) from taking it out for a spin. They used a variety of sensors to monitor the DeLorean for any unusual or unauthorized activity, and if all else failed, were prepared to administer a deadly voltage through the steering wheel (represented by harmless LEDs in the demo) to stop the interloper from stealing their time machine. The team has a wonderful write up of the sensors they used, along with the products used to bring everything together.

This was a very energetic team who we hope will use their new Raspberry Pis to keep the space-time continuum clear.

KegTime

The KegTime project aimed to make us all more responsible drinkers by using an RFID reader to measure alcohol consumption and call Uber for you when you have had enough. They used a SoftLayer server to host all the drinking data, and used it to interact with Uber’s API to call a ride at the appropriate moment. Their demo included a working (and filled) keg with a pretty fancy LED-laden tap, which was very impressive. In recognition of their efforts to make us all more responsible drinkers, we awarded them five Raspberry Pis so they can continue to build cool projects to make the world a better place.

The Future of Hackster.io
Although this is the end of the event in San Francisco, there are many more Hackster.io events coming up in the near future. I will be going to Phoenix next on March 28 and look forward to all the new projects inventors come up with.

You're a conflicted zombie that yearns to be human again. Now you've got to dodge grandma and babies in an 8-bit side-scroller. Now you're Vimberly Koll, and you have to stop Poseidon from raining down on the Global Game Jam. At the end of Global Game Jam Vancouver, teams of developers, 3D artists, level designers and sound engineers conceptualized and created these games (along with a number of others) in less than 48 hours. Building a game in a weekend is no small task, so only the best and brightest game developers in the world converge on over 300 sites in 63 countries to show off their skills.

For the fifth annual Global Game Jam, more than 16,000 participants committed a weekend to learning from and collaborating with their peers in a worldwide game development hackathon. I was lucky enough to get to sit in on the action in Vancouver, and I thought I'd give you a glimpse into how participants make game development magic happen in such a short period of time.

Day 1 (Friday Night): The Brainstorm
More than 260 participants poured into an open study area of the Life Sciences building at the Univerity of British Columbia to build the next best distraction ... er, video game. The event kicked off with a keynote from Brian Proviciano, a game development prodigy, who shared his history and offered sage advice for those interested in the industry. Following a comical 20-second idea pitch session, the caffeine began to flow and the brainstorm commenced.

Inspiration could come from anywhere, and a perfect example is the "Poseidon" game I mentioned above: GGJVancouver organizer Kimberly Voll had sprinklers rain on her office a few days prior to the event, so someone decided to make a game out of that situation. This year, the Global Game Jam introduced an interesting twist that they called "diversifiers." Diversifiers are side-challenges for extra credit, and two of my favorites were "Atari Age" — the game has to be smaller than 4kb — and "May the (Web) Force be With You" — the game has to run in a browser.

Fast-forward two hours, and as you look around, you see storyboards and scripts being written, characters being born, and a few intrepid developers starting to experiment with APIs, game engines , and external controllers to find some additional flair for their final products. You wouldn't expect a game made in 48 hours to incorporate an iOS Eye Tracking API or the Leap Motion gesture controller, but these developers are ambitious!

As the concepts are finalized, team members rotate in and out for sleep, and some even go home to get some rest — a good idea on the first night since everyone usually pulls an all-nighter on Saturday.

Day 2 (Saturday): Laying the Foundation
It was cool to walk the aisles and peer over peoples' shoulders as musical scores, wrangled code and character models were coming together. However, the scene wasn't all smiles and hugs; a few groups were wrestling quirky bugs and integration issues, and in some cases, they ended up having to completely reboot their approach. Day 2 set the course for all of the teams. A few teams disbanded due to disagreements or unfixable bugs, and some developers peeled off from their teams to follow an untamed passion. In the Global Game Jam, there are no rules ... only games.

Day 3 (Sunday): Sleep, What's That?
By Day 3, the building starts feeling like a college dorm during finals week when everyone is staying up all night to study or finish their comp-sci assignments (I know it wasn't just me...). Running on various vehicles of caffeine, teams worked heads-down all day to meet their 3pm deadline. Sighs of relief and high fives were exchanged when the games were submitted, and the event concluded with a pizza party and demo session where everyone could see and share the fruits of their labor.

As I left the conference, teams were given the opportunity to showcase their games on the big screen to a chorus of laughter and applause. It was an awesome experience, and I'm glad SoftLayer sponsored it so that I could attend, take it all in and meet a ton of outstanding up-and-coming game developers. If you're into making games (or you've thought about it), check out the Global Game Jam one of these years.